Cancer treatments lose efficacy as disease spreads or develops from a manageable stage. Without early detection and treatment, the likelihood of surviving cancer is lower and the quality of a patient's life is severely lessened. Accordingly, appropriate treatments for aggressive cancers remain an unmet need in oncology.
Further still, another major limitation of current treatments for cancer is the selection of appropriate active agents for a patient. It is common that sub-optimal chemotherapy is provided to a patient, resulting in unsuccessful treatment. For example, adequate assays and biomarkers for assessing patient tumors are lacking, resulting in a reduction in the likelihood of therapeutic success. This is especially so in the context of more aggressive tumors, which often call for aggressive and swift therapy.
Therefore, there remains a need for methods for treating and/or diagnosing aggressive cancer types.